Variations sur l'origine du monde
2017

Sofronis Arts, Luxembourg

When in 2015, on the occasion of my 85th year, they asked for
an exhibition at the Athens Megaron Concert Hall,
instead of a retrospective of my work up to that time,
I preferred to do 85 new paintings, done as a single work,
in which I proposed not an image but the elements with which the image is composed.
And I called them 'Elements for the creation of possible masterpieces'.

"Ideas, lines, shapes and colours, the Giocondas, the Meninas, and the Gurenicas. And the Devil, but also God"... 
I wrote at the entrance of the exhibition.
With those elements I created, in the first phase, an optical chaos
and then I attempted to impose order on it, as was done by Nature, by God.

Then I thought: who is the creator of masterpieces?

Who is it that, with his will, his ability and his talent, creates masterpieces?
Man! The human person! And how was the human made? Fatefully, my thoughts went to intercourse, to the penis in the vagina, to semen, to the womb,
to the female breasts, to the mouth, to the sources of creation and sensual pleasure. So, although I hadn't painted human bodies in sixty years,
taking as a model my memories, my desires and fantasies, I began to draw erotic moments of a couple. Nothing unnatural or original, nothing crude or immoral, but that which is done by all of us, servants and kings, every day in our honourable houses with our companion. I was agitated by these drawings, finding that in working on them and seeing them I myself was erotically excited. It was as though something inside me awakened, something that with time and custom had ebbed. I lost myself in the hours of drawing and recollection and I felt my body reacting, as in the good old days.

So I decided to do those fifteen paintings in natural human dimensions
(perhaps a bit supernatural) not as voyeurism but as though I was seeing myself in a mirror. In my imagination I became young again and as I owed no explanations to anyone, I adapted to my desires, the organs and bodies of the lovers. I forgot that I was painting.
I was making love. But without ever completing the erotic act.
Thus, I held within myself the spasm of desire that revitalised me.

 C.T.